The Perissos Conference

Would you like to make another conference possible? Let’s talk about it on Deeper Waters.

My good friend Lynn Erhorn of Perissos Resources, a Christian ministry, is in the works of preparing a conference. While there will be apologetics involved, which piques my interest, this will not be just apologetics. There will be venues of all types based on TheologyWeb.com.

Some of you know that I am a member on staff at TheologyWeb. This is my favorite place to debate and Deeper Waters has its own section there. At TWeb, as we often call it, there’s something for everyone. You want to discuss TV shows, movies, and video games? You can. Want to discuss your pets or cooking? You can. Want to discuss psychology and philosophy? You can. Do men just want to get together and talk man stuff and women get together and talk women stuff? There are places for that. There are naturally places for just silliness.

We want to have a conference with the same format. There will be numerous guests and speakers. That also includes Yours Truly, though I have no idea yet for sure what I’ll be speaking on. We are also hoping to be able to get Tim Tebow to come and speak on the relationship of God to sports.

I have been to two TWeb conventions and both of them have been thoroughly entertaining and informative and also a precursor of the Kingdom I’d say. At the end of the first one, I remember being the worship leader and leading as many of us sang a hymn together from all over the world and many different denominations united in Christ and how I thought that this is what eternity is meant to be like.

I hope this conference sounds as exciting to you as it does to me.

Now here’s the problem.

This conference could possibly never be.

Why? We need interest generated and for that, we need just 250 people to fill out the survey that we have. It will only take a few minutes of your time and you could be benefiting yourself as well as numerous others who want to see this as a possibility.

Some of you might be skeptical. I know Lynn Erhorn, the one in charge of Perissos. She is a trusted friend in all areas. As I prepared for marriage, she has been one I can talk to and at some points when I’ve wanted to get some advice, she has always been a good advisor. We were greatly pleased to have her be one of the guests at our wedding. (And she was greatly pleased I understand to discover Cheerwine after the wedding. All of that of course I got secondhand.)

Friends. I don’t normally write a post like this that would be a pure advertisement, but this time I am making an exception. Would you please take a few minutes of your time and fill out this survey and give some feedback on what you’d like to see at the conference?

The links are included below.

In Christ,
Nick Peters.

www.theologyweb.com.

http://www.perissosonline.org/2012/05/01/large-theology-conference-coming-soon/

http://www.perissosonline.org/forms/conference-survey/

The Uninteresting God

Why do so many of us want to sleep in on Sunday morning? Let’s talk about it on Deeper Waters.

N.T. Wright talked once about greeting undergrads at his college and how many of them would say they wouldn’t be seeing him much since they don’t believe in God. He’d ask which one they don’t believe in. They’d describe someone who lives in the sky and watches all that we do and sends good people to Heaven and bad people to Hell. Wright would tell them he doesn’t believe in that god either. He goes on to say he doesn’t think he’d bother getting out of bed to worship a god like that either.

Maybe those of us who sometimes drag ourselves out of bed think that we are in fact worshiping that god.

“But Nick! Doesn’t the Bible speak of our Father in Heaven and doesn’t it say that God is in Heaven and we are on Earth so let our words be few?”

“Yes. Yes it does.”

“Then that means God is in Heaven.”

This assumes that Heaven is some place in the sky and that when Jesus was doing the ascension, it was a kind of Star Trek idea where he was teleporting back to the home base or something of that sort. Do we really think Jesus could be flying through space like Superman and eventually reach a spot where there you will find where God lives? Once you reach that spot, just keep going down the street of gold until you reach the throne in the center and you’ll see God just sitting right there on the throne.

It sounds ludicrous, but it is what so many of us probably implicitly believe.

Then are the sayings about God being in Heaven nonsense? Not at all! They most certainly have meaning, but not the meaning of 21st century Americans.

Let us suppose as C.S. Lewis once said that instead of ascending, Jesus disappeared by burrowing underground. The disciples would have the picture of themselves being the authority in fact. Man has dominion over the Earth. God lives in the Earth. Man therefore has dominion over God. Jesus instead goes into the sky. Something you notice about the sky is that it’s transcendent. It’s limitless. No matter where you go, you see it, and you can never see the end of it. Today in the space age, we know even more that it’s greater than we’ve ever imagined.

That is the picture of God. God is limitless. God is transcendent. God overpowers us where ever we go. He cannot be localized to one place.

That does not mean that there are places where He does not make His presence more apparent. For the Jews, that would have been in the Temple. For the Christians, it is also in the Temple, but it is not the Temple of wood and stone, but rather the Temple of flesh and blood. First, it was the earthly body of Christ. Now, it is also the church body of Christ as we are God’s Temple and Christ is the cornerstone of that Temple.

What this means is we need to jettison from our minds the belief that God is just somewhere out there and He is living away at a distance and every now and then he’ll step in and do something great and then He’s back to doing whatever it is that He’s been doing, which usually consists of making sure people get good parking spaces who pray.

If God is not localized out there, then where is He? Where is He? Look around you. THAT IS WHERE HE IS! That’s right. God is omnipresent. Heaven and Earth cannot contain Him and in fact, every single ounce of space around you has within it the full presence of God. God is not an absentee landlord at all as in Deism. God is in fact always there and we are told that He not only created all things but He sustains all things.

This is one problem I can have traditionally with the Kalam argument that most people know about. It explains that God starts things off, but why think He is still there? Many people seem to think God’s only work with the material world is creation and once He creates, well the universe can get along just fine without Him.

This is absolute nonsense and don’t believe it for a second. This universe, you, and I, and everything else that is, even the angels themselves, depend on God’s sustaining of their existence for Him to be. He could be apart from everything else that exists. Everything else that exists could not be apart from Him.

A sign of our problem is that so often we can think of how God makes too many demands supposedly on our lives. Yes. God makes demands. Guess what. If you go to work, your boss makes demands of you. If you are a student, your teacher makes demands. If you are a child, your parents make demands. People who are in authority do have the power to set requirements for us. God is not obligated to give us anything. We are rightly obligated to give Him everything.

It’s like treating God as an affront to our own existence. We saw off the branch of the tree we are sitting on. We have to have Him for our existence. He could do away with all of us and exist just fine. Some who believe in a tithe could complain that God wants 10% of their money. In fact, God has all right to ask for 100% of your money and doesn’t. We can think it a burden to give God about three hours on a Sunday, which is three out of 168 hours in a week. Strange we don’t see our time wasted that much if we go see a three hour movie or play a video game for three hours or anything else that takes time like that.

Why has this happened? We have accepted a pop theology view of God as if He really was confined to one place and was at a distance and is not a constant reality here on Earth. We know the saying “Out of sight, Out of Mind.” God is indeed that for us. We can’t see His form to be sure, but we see things existing and say “I don’t see Him active around here.” Yes. Of course you don’t, and I suppose you think those trees in front of you can provide their own existence. I wonder where from.

If evangelicalism is going to have an effect in America, it will need to be rooted in a God that is really worthy of worship instead of the weak God too many of drag out of bed to go worship on Sunday. Yes, this could be a failure in our churches, but could that failure in the church be because we have a failed theology to start?

In Christ,
Nick Peters

Presenting Jesus as Real

Is Jesus truly as real as the air we breathe? Let’s talk about it on Deeper Waters.

To begin with, this post is not about making an apologetics case. That does not mean that this post is useless with apologetics. On the contrary, I think it is of utmost importance for how we do apologetics today and also how we do evangelism. It is a concern that the methods we have that are so successful may not be as successful as we think.

I was thinking this today outside of a church responsible for a large local revival. If I met the pastor, I might ask how many conversions took place. I am sure I would get a sizable number. How many disciples then? Ah. That might be a more difficult question. How many times was Jesus really presented as a historical reality who walked among us? That could be a bit ambiguous.

Of course Jesus is presented that way! We open up our Bibles and there he is!

Indeed, there he is, but do we not pause to consider that the early church did not have a gospel save the Old Testament and the Old Testament does not include in it the life and death of Jesus. One can point to prophecies, but there is no explicit message as there is in the New Testament.

To say we open up our Bibles is excellent if you’re talking to people who already know the Bible is from God. It is not for those who do not. When asked by many why they should believe the Bible, it is quite likely that the answer that one will get is “faith.”

By what reason should one not believe the Book of Mormon? By what reason should one not believe the Koran? If these are not by faith, the great danger is that there will simply be an appeal to emotion. The sad problem is that the Mormon will quite easily also point to an emotion and say by what basis do you accept your emotion as being from God and not His?

This can also happen with miracle claims as well and we must admit that. It can often be assumed that the Christian rejects all virgin births and all resurrections, except for in the case of Jesus. There is absent any notion that Jesus’s are the ones that actually do have a historical case for them.

Let us be upfront about miracles then. There is no reason to reject miracles from other religions prima facie. Let us be open-minded with them as we want others to be with ours. We do not want to accept all claims blindly, but it is just as bad to reject all claims blindly.

So what are we to do?

In Season 3 of Smallville, Clark Kent finds out that his father Jor-El might actually have visited Earth at one time and even passed through Smallville. Clark tells his father Jonathan that up until now Jor-El had been a distant and powerful friend, but what if he really had come down here? Maybe he was more like Clark than Clark realized.

To be sure, Jesus did become fully human, but let us not think that God is like us. He is not. We are to be like Him instead. I am not like the image that I see in the mirror. The image that I see in the mirror is like me. That being said, what of the distant and powerful friend?

That is often how Jesus can be presented. Jesus is at a distance and He’s powerful, but what is it that He is doing in life? Too often, it is presented as if Jesus is there to fix a lot of your problems. Financial struggles? Jesus can help you. Struggle with alcoholism? Try Jesus. Problematic children at home? Jesus can help you be a good parent. Marriage problems? Jesus can help you be a good spouse.

I am not disagreeing with any of these in reality. I do think that if you truly follow Jesus, it should affect your lifestyle in various ways. My concern is that this reduces Jesus to simply the latest self-help cure. Do we have any evidence that this is what Jesus was like for the first century Christians?

Doubtful. To be a Christian then was to sign your own death warrant. How many would sign a death warrant just because the children were a problem when the cult just down the street could help me with that as well and as a special bonus, you get to participate in these great orgies rather than having to live the strict moral code the Christians followed. Oh yes. Let’s not forget that also the emperor didn’t care if you joined that group so your life could be safe.

So what does it mean if we present Jesus that way and instead get the answer back that “Medication does that for me” or “I happen to be seeing a really good therapist and he’s helped me immensely” or “Have you not read the latest self-help book?”

Now once again, I am not against any of the above mentioned, but I am against presenting Jesus as if He’s just the better product amongst competition. It’s not as if we want to make an infomercial saying “Try Jesus. We guarantee full satisfaction or your money back!”

When it comes to presenting Him, are we presenting Him as real? We can often ask people how they know the reality of Jesus and we are presented with an emotional response. The Mormons will also give the exact same answer for how they know that Joseph Smith is a prophet.

This puts us in a danger. What if your sole basis for knowing that Jesus is real is a feeling? You are a sitting duck then for the Mormon. When you have that contrary feeling from the Mormons, will you suddenly switch to Joseph Smith? Will he be a better product?

What also when you hear atheistic and liberal professors go against your most cherished beliefs that you hold on that basis? Will you go on believing but with a cognitive dissonance that thinks you have to jettison reality in order to be a Christian, or will you just abandon the faith? In either case, you will be useless for the Kingdom if not even a detriment.

The other danger is that basing it on a feeling will instead produce a chasing not after Jesus, not after holiness, but rather after a feeling. When you feel X, then the world is right, but there could be all manner of reasons for not feeling X at a point in time. Perhaps you have a cold or you had a bad night’s sleep or you ate the wrong thing or had an argument with your spouse.

This is how addictions are made and with an addiction, one does not seek the object of the addiction but rather one seeks the feeling that comes from the object. The person does not want drugs for drugs but drugs for a high. The person does not want sex out of love for the other, but rather out of seeking a strong experience and really good sensations.

Using the last example, how many people would like their marriage to be based on a feeling? Most would say that if they did that, they would have to get a new spouse every two to three years. What woman would like to know that her husband likes having her around for sexual joy, but other than that, oh well?

Now am I totally opposed to feelings in all of this? Absolutely not! Some of you out there are very emotionally oriented and praise God for it. I have no problem. Some of you like myself are more rationally oriented. Let us make sure that neither looks down on the other. We need both types. I am against a blind emotionalism. I am also against a cold intellectualism.

What I am saying is that the emotional person needs to have an emotion that is rooted in truth. A rational person needs to have an argument that produces a difference in the world. That gets us to the point then of presenting Jesus as real.

If we claim that Jesus is as real to us as the air that we breathe, we need to live that out. Jesus cannot be just the end of a syllogism or a study of historical research. He also cannot be the quick fix in our lives alone. Jesus can be the one who helps us with our problems and also the result of a historical study, but He is surely much more than that.

Jesus made the claim that He is the king of all creation. All of eternity depends on Him. If He is risen, then life has meaning. If He is not, then let us eat, drink, and be merry for tomorrow we die. Jesus did not come down here to do miracles alone as if He was showing off His divinity. Each miracle He did had a greater purpose than just helping the person in need.

Jesus also did not come solely to forgive us of our sins. He came for that, but He did not come for just that. He came to bring life to a world that was dying. That would include the forgiveness of sins, but it would also include the transformation of lives and then that of society.

Yet for us, the transformation seems to be what we can get through self-help, therapy, or medication and the goods that He gives us are really happy feelings whenever we think about Him. Would the such have been said for another king at the time, such as Caesar? “Try Caesar as king! You’ll like him and you’ll be a better parent too!”

It is when we realize that Jesus is King, Lord, and Judge, that we come to realize how it is that we must live. History is not about us and our feelings and pitiful little desires. It is all about Him. He is really the central focus of the universe. All roads do truly end at Jesus. Some end with Him as friend. Others end with Him as foe. All end with Him as Judge giving the ultimate verdict.

Perhaps when we realize that, we will be partaking in a Kingdom agenda and with that will come again what came in the first century and onward, the transformation of society. Perhaps when we put Jesus on the throne again and take ourselves off we will come to see the good He can do. Perhaps when we realize that the way of Christ is better than our way will we start living our lives accordingly. We will realize Jesus is not distant. He is ever-present and at any time can take us out of the picture if He so desires. He does not need us for anything. We need Him for everything.

It is my sincere hope that when we do all of this, we will then get to the apologetic of backing our evangelism with the case for Jesus as the Risen King and why we believe such. When we do such, could it be that then we will have our revolution that we need to stop a world in moral decline?

In Christ,
Nick Peters

D.A. Carson and Presuppositionalism

Has D.A. Carson given us a sound proof of the existence of God? Let’s talk about it on Deeper Waters.

First off, my thanks to the people of Asbury Seminary who when they saw through Ratio Christi that I needed a new computer came to the rescue and today, I am writing this blog on a new computer, making it the first one on this one. I look forward to seeing what all this computer can do.

I now have my speakers hooked up which they hadn’t been so I took some time to watch a video sent to me by Adam Tucker of Ratio Christi who appreciates my work on looking at presuppositionalism. The video is a four minute one by D.A. Carson on if God exists. There will be a link at the bottom.

Let’s start with some positives. First off, we all owe a great debt to Carson for the work that he has done in biblical studies over the years. While I disagree with his presuppositionalism, I do acknowledge the work that he has done for the kingdom that will be a benefit for generations to come.

I also do not question his great desire to see conversion as he calls it take place. Personally, I don’t prefer to speak about conversion but more about discipleship, but I know what Carson means by the term so I will not quibble hairs at this point.

Looking at his video, Carson makes many of the same statements. To begin with, he says that we are assuming that we can know something independently of God. Now as a Christian, I do agree that God is the basis of all knowledge. I have no problem with that idea. What I have a problem with is coming to the unbeliever as if that is something that is already known.

There are a number of philosophers who will say they know many things while being atheists, and I agree with them. They do not find the presuppositional answer convincing and I’d say the reason they don’t is presuppositionalism strikes me as a modern idea based on having absolute certainty only even on such questions as “Do I exist?” or “Is reason valid?” Sorry, but to ask the question of if reason is valid means from the get go are we going to use the first tool we’ve got or not? Will the conversation continue reasonably or unreasonably?

Descartes would be pleased. Others before him would be surprised the question is even asked. This is not to say there’s anything wrong with the question of reason. I do agree that if we are merely the result of a cosmic accident, it would seem odd that we trust our reasoning, but that is only after much argumentation.

For the older philosophers, you could not start with an idea and get a fact, and I agree. This is why I reject the ontological argument. You cannot start with an idea of God and then get to the real God. An idea does not become a fact in that way.

Carson then tells us that to ask the question is to put us in the judgment seat and making God merely the end of a syllogism. This kind of statement is repeated which is saying something for a video only four minutes long. To begin with, as a classical apologist, I find it insulting to say I treat God merely as the end of a syllogism. Once I reach God, I must come to grasp with what it is I have reached rather than just saying “Well that was fun. What’s the next argument?”

Second, we are not in the judgment seat in the sense that our judgment determines if God exists or not, but rather in the sense that we decide if we think the evidence is conclusive enough for us that God exists. Everyone knows that either God exists or not regardless of what we think. God can exist and the world have nothing but atheists. God can not exist and the world be full of nothing but theists.

Carson does ask questions about how someone would explain numerous X’s. As soon as he’s done this, he’s no longer in presuppositional mode as the person is being asked to make a judgment on a kind of evidence. Even the presuppositional argument itself is presented as an evidence.

Carson also says that arguments for God’s existence are not done this way in the Bible with atheists. I can only think of one part in the Bible where atheists could be addressed and that is in Acts 17. Frankly, we also don’t know much about what he said, but from what we have, he does not ask them the basis of their knowledge.

Carson then tells us about how many people will just read the Bible and God will open their eyes. No Christian will deny this. To say this happens is not the same as saying this is the only way a conversion takes place. It can also be done through good argumentation. Also, the early Christians were not converted this way. They could not read the story of Jesus as the gospels weren’t written yet. Even if they had been, few of them could read so they would again have the same problem.

The problem in the end is while the approach can consistently explain the questions that we have, consistency does not equal correspondence. Because there is a solution that works, it does not mean that that is indeed the true solution. The only way we can know is if it corresponds to reality.

In conclusion, I do applaud much that Carson has done, but there are good arguments for God’s existence and the resurrection as well. We need to use them.

In Christ,
Nick Peters

D.A. Carson’s talk: http://www.realapologetics.org/blog/2010/07/14/da-carson-and-presuppositional-apologetics/